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CHAPTER 5

The Dutch Ousted from the Mainland: Slavery and the Slave Trade Expand

The taking of Jamaica was transformative for the fortunes of settler colonialism and disastrous for Africans and indigenes alike. It took place as the sugar boom was launched, enriching colonizers as it doomed Africans to deadly toil. It provided a model for mainlanders, which they pursued vigorously well into the nineteenth century, ousting indigenes from the land while stocking it with enslaved Africans in order to generate immense wealth. This nasty enrichment contributed to a hastening of formation of racial lines of demarcation encapsulated in the militarized identity politics that was “whiteness.” It provided a foundation for the takeoff of capitalism. And it motivated London to deliver a knockout blow to the Dutch, driving them from Manhattan in 1664, and eventually from the lucrative trade in enslaved Africans, which provided a model for their brethren in 1776 when Britain was knocked out by rebels, and then limped toward abolitionism. Just as the English fattened the Dutch for slaughter—in the guise of aiding their battle against Madrid—London in retrospect seized land from North American indigenes that was then used to bolster revolting republicans in 1776, who then began to surpass the British Empire in succeeding decades.

After decades of savage struggle among colonizers, London was emerging triumphant. London was more flexible than Madrid in accepting a Jewish community and more accepting than Paris in embracing fleeing Huguenots. But more than that, by being ferocious in enslaving Africans and seizing the land of the indigenous of North America, it accumulated capital that guaranteed its rise to unparalleled heights in science, which was parlayed into further attainments. Jamaica was essential to this bloody scramble.1

For our purposes, consider that the enslaved population of Barbados rose from an estimated 12,800 to 50,000 between 1661 and 1700, while Jamaica’s rose from an estimated 500 to 42,000 during this same period.2 Barbadians had for decades been a prime customer of Dutch slave traders: from 1638 to about 1665, most of the Africans shipped to what was rapidly becoming London’s richest colony were borne on Dutch ships. Yet now, with the opportunity opened for enslavement by Manhattan and Jamaica, most of the Africans to be delivered there and Barbados and the Leeward Islands were coming on English ships at the rate of thousands per year. Gobbling a rising share in the remunerative market in slaves allowed London to leapfrog and secure a foothold in the slave trade to French settlements in Martinique and Guadeloupe, meaning more taxes accrued, more buttressing of the Royal Navy —and even more Africans dragged from the continent. Then, with disturbances increasing along Africa’s coastlines due to the transition to English supremacy in the slave trade, Spanish colonies were forced to look to traders from Liverpool and Bristol to supply them too, as the

Horne, Gerald. The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism : The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean, Monthly Review Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4844848. Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2019-01-18 08:22:47.

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Dutch sailed off into the sunset.3 However, the Dutch outpost at the southern tip of Africa remained an essential link in the

enslaving chain. In 1664 an English slaver sailing from Madagascar to Barbados stopped at Cape Town to negotiate with fellow Europeans about other potential sites to buy human flesh. A few years later, showing they had not abandoned the field altogether, the Dutch temporarily ousted the English from nearby St. Helena Island, then seized a slave ship en route from Mozambique and Madagascar to Barbados, demonstrating that it would be shortsighted to altogether ignore that small European nation.4

The Dutch did not surrender market share willingly. But they were swimming against a high tide. Yes, they picked on an even smaller Portugal and ousted this overweening nation from its stronghold in Angola,5 a prime site for enslaving, which complemented the companion seizure of Recife, Brazil. But when Portugal made a swift comeback in both,6 this should have been a giveaway that competing in the high-stakes game of colonialism and enslavement may not have been the Dutch strong suit.

Nonetheless, English slave traders in Africa complained bitterly that these unscrupulous competitors “have set natives upon us” and “shot at our flag,” with little long-term awareness of the downstream racial effects. Hopping mad, this only encouraged London and the increasingly important class of merchants and traders to be even more inclined to wage war against the Dutch. Many in this class were swimming in success in light of the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, after Cromwell died. They were or at least pretended to be solidly Anglican Royalist and thus were willing to display their belligerent colors.7

The Africans were similarly bellicose, if not more so, which added to the overall combustibility. Those arriving in the area stretching from Boston to New Haven, then Manhattan, were sometimes multilingual, giving them an ability to dicker with Dutch and English alike to the detriment of both. At times they had ties to the Persian Gulf and Madagascar, making them more cosmopolitan and sophisticated than their often unlettered, monolingual captors. It was during this time that Massachusetts passed a law specifically targeting arson, as Africans were well aware of the destructive impact of fire.8

With the loss of New Netherland9 and the complementary assault absorbed by the Dutch in West Africa, London attained a kind of vertical integration, creating a supply chain that reached from Africa to the Caribbean, producing commodities then sold in Europe and elsewhere.10 The wealth—of some—in London rose accordingly, along with the ire of the enslaved. Eventually this was to impel settlers, notably in Barbados, to repair to Carolina, serving to ignite events that were to culminate in secession in 1776.

Correspondingly, there were an estimated 300 Africans in Maryland in 1650, 758 in 1660, and 1,190 in 1670 (about 9 percent of the population), with the trend line continuing upward in succeeding decades. By 1670, Virginia’s African population had soared to 2,000. Most, if not all, had arrived to these two future states not directly from Africa but from the Caribbean, underscoring the unavoidable links between the mainland and the islands. Nevertheless, the status of Africans had yet to be frozen, and like Anthony Johnson, the Angolan who became a landowner in this region, some had managed to escape perpetual servitude. However, as

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London felt the need to downplay indentured servitude, as the hunger for profit gripped the imagination, and as competitors like Spain and the Netherlands were knocked down like tenpins, the equivalence of “African” and “slave” began to ossify.11 That is, the foundation for capitalism was laid as racial slavery was hardened.

After Cromwell expired, his ambitious “Western Design”12 was only partially fulfilled, at a high cost in fatalities and with Ireland bleeding and prostrate. His complicated legacy included bruised feelings in Ireland, which was to vex London’s foreign and domestic policies for years to come. Even as he was departing the scene, certain Londoners were braying about the “subjection of all traytors” because of the “massacre of the Protestant English” in Ireland.13 (Just as at the inception of the United States, the lineal descendant of London, a towering problem was created by the idea that difficulties for the Republic meant opportunities for the enslaved and indigenes, difficulty for England would mean opportunity for Ireland.)

By then, the “inhumane and barbarous sufferings of the people called Quakers in the City of Bristol” was at issue,14 which had the colonial benefit of forcing some from this group to migrate to Barbados and the mainland, shoring up besieged settlements.

Cromwell’s cutthroat record had created antagonists as it was precipitating the wealth of empowered merchants. By 1660 there had been a royal restoration of the monarch, Charles II. In 1640 in Lisbon, then a city of 175,000, about forty noblemen with about 100 followers were able to engineer a coup. Two decades later, George Monck entered London, a city of perhaps 250,000 inhabitants, with fewer than 6,000 soldiers. Exhausted after a 350-mile march in winter from the Scottish border, they were able to set in motion a termination of the republican experiment—perhaps forever.15

Royalists had learned their lesson and, in some ways, their pushing for, and engaging in, the rocketing realm of slave trading and territorial aggrandizement kept merchants as a discrete class occupied, so busy counting their pounds they could find little time for regime change. Besides, some royalists had lost prestige during the Cromwell era, and new vistas in the Americas helped them to regain lost ground—at times, literally—and reduce their dependence on Parliament, viewed as a Cromwellian holdover.16

Regicides continued to hole up in New England, particularly New Haven, escaping potential wrath from royalists and helping to solidify a separate North American identity that blossomed in 1776.17

After 1655, London’s rule in Jamaica was not consolidated fully. After the seizure of Jamaica, the Lord Protector considered moving New Englanders around as if they were pieces on a chessboard, a kind of high-handedness that helped as well to fuel a distinct identity by 1776. They should “people Ireland,” it was thought at first, after that nation had been depopulated through massacre and dispersal. Or maybe their “bettering” would involve residing in Jamaica: It did not seem to matter if settlers had sunk roots in Boston, when a high- handed London requested—or demanded—they move to a boisterous Jamaica.18

Emoluments and enticements of various sorts continued to be offered—land in the first instance. However, putative settlers were also told bluntly that they would be expected to “serve in arms upon any insurrection, mutiny or foreign invasion,” which was a sign of the

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unpredictability of this latest acquisition.19 By mid-1660 the Royal Navy was instructed that in Jamaica Spaniards had been “beaten

off, not one left in the island, and no enemy but thirty or forty Negroes who were in rebellion with the Spaniards.”20 Shortly thereafter, as the situation was apparently calming, the Earl of Marlborough was again mulling over proposals designed to “encourage all willing to transplant themselves to Jamaica,” which meant “hasten the settlement of New England affairs, from whence [a] good store of men may be expected.” Jamaica should become “the staple for the sale of blacks,” and the “Negroes to be delivered to the island” should become a regional center for distribution. To facilitate the arrival of settlers, “religious toleration” was “to be granted to all who desire it,” and to curb complicating miscegenation, London should “send over women for planters’ wives.” The former, in particular, was to receive plaudits from students of the Enlightenment who confused a measure designed to gain an adequate racial supply with intentional avant-garde thinking.21

From 1660 to 1688 there was over a 1,000-ton increase in the capacity of the Royal Navy, with the average size of ships growing by 40 percent.22 These vessels received a workout in the Atlantic, helping to ensure that Africans would continue to be enslaved and Native Americans dispossessed.

From the taking of Jamaica to 1700, the value of imports from the Caribbean and North America, primarily sugar and tobacco, roughly doubled,23 which whetted the appetite for the methods that had delivered this wealth: dispossession and enslavement. By mid-1659 instructions were dispatched to the “Guinea Coast” with a request “to procure tenn Negroes [,] men and women, such as are lusty and of the younger sort,”24 a non-gendered demand thereafter was “procure 12 Lusty young Negroes.”25 But London was still annoyed by the presence of competitors: the “troublesome … seas” in the region were “infested with Spanish men-of- war,”26 while “Danes” and “Dutch” continued to lurk, too.27 Methodically, as the Dutch were being driven from the field, more attention was turned to the older antagonist that was Spain.28

Continued hand-wringing about African intentions were refracted in the blinding light brought by a “fire at Cape Coast” that generated substantial losses.29 As arson took hold as a major tool of slave resistance, similar fires broke out continually in Barbados.30 Soon an uprising flared in Gambia: “31 or 32 of the English were slain,” it was reported balefully, “and about 40 Negroes and the rest ran away,” as the would-be slaves “rebelled and possessed themselves” of territory theretofore claimed by London.31

With the taking of Jamaica, and the companion desire to chain more Africans, came ever fiercer resistance and a devolving dislike of the prospective human property in what amounted to a deathly spiral downward. One conflict, occurring as Gambia was being bloodied, involved “intolerable pain” inflicted upon the potential captor “in a barbarous manner,” said an Englishman; the Africans “cut off pieces of his flesh from his buttocks, thighs, arms and shoulders,” while “during this time,” the tables were turned and the hunter became “a slave.” Still, the writer was seemingly undeterred by this ghastly episode, speaking dreamily of future conquests at the Cape, Madagascar, even Persia and South Asia, all linked to London via the potent Royal Navy.

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Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Barbados in the 1660s ambivalence grew about the rising number of Africans, while the Irish, derided by the Negroes as “white” slaves, were in ill humor (perhaps incentives could be granted them to improve their mood). Many Europeans who were capable of doing so were fleeing to the mainland, providing added reason to bring benefits to those remaining. “There are many thousands of slaves that speak English,” it was added worriedly by officialdom and “if there are many leading men slaves in a Plantation, they may be easily wrought upon to betray it, especially on the promise of a freedom” by potential invaders. A true “whiteness” had yet to assert itself forcefully as it was added, “the Jews, not having like liberty as in the Dutch and French islands, have been very treacherous.”32 Thus there were persistent calls and petitions for more aid to slave trading as the importance of this commerce was seen as bolstering shipbuilding, export of goods, import of goods, and the economy as a whole.33

William Blathwayt, from a Protestant merchant clan in England, served as an administrator in the settlements; promoting the slave trade was one of his specialties. As if it were a model statute, he filed away a bill from Barbados from 1661 calling for the “better ordering and governing of Negroes.” Stated starkly was the notion that “if any Negro either man or woman shall offer any violence to any Christian”—not “white” person, a designation soon to come —“by striking or the like, such Negro shall for his or her first offence” be “severely whipped.” If it persists, “his nose” was to be “slit and be burned in some part of his face.” Planters, he lamented, “have much suffered by the running away of their Negroes” and more unsparing measures had to be imposed.34

Ill-humored Europeans continued to be shipped to Barbados, and placing them among conspiring Africans was hardly a prescription for stability. Ultimately, Europeans began moving en masse to South Carolina in the context of phasing out indentured labor and seeking to assuage these landless men, notably after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. But before then there was gnashing of teeth about the “lives” of European laborers becoming “as cheap as those Negroes.” Planters tended to “look upon them”—meaning poorer Europeans—“as their goods [and] horses” and “rack them only to make their time out of them and cherish them to perform their work.” Surely revaluing these workers’ lives upward through a heavy dose of “whiteness” could allay this looming problem. Already, Thomas Burton, a comrade of Cromwell and the ineffectual son Richard who sought to replace him, knew that those who “is the Cavalier” or royalist “today, may be the Roundhead a year hence.” So, why not leave wretched Christian status behind and “today” assume privileged racial status? “Two or three thousand Protestants were sent to the Barbadoes against their consent,” Burton said in 165935 and something must be done—soon.

AFTER THE TAKING OF JAMAICA, which delivered a felt need to escalate enslavement, settlers descended upon Africa with steely determination. Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660 and realized that joining the surging merchants made more sense than seeking to defeat them, as the Company of Royal Adventurers (CRA) was given the sole right to trade in Africa from Gibraltar to the Cape of Good Hope. By 1664 Englishmen were attacking slave forts of

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European competitors in West Africa, as the Dutch were ousted from their foothold along the Gold Coast.36 In 1637 the Dutch expelled the Portuguese from near El Mina, and Lisbon’s power in the vicinity began to disintegrate, and now the Netherlands was victimized.37

Since the fifteenth century, European merchants had sought the source of the famous gold of Guinea, from which the English coin of the same name was minted, an adjunct of the hunt for African bodies that dwarfed previous efforts. In 1662, the Company of Royal Adventurers, the chief slave traders, descended with force on Africa: they would be supplanted by London’s Royal African Company a decade later, whose position was then eroded by deregulation of this ugly commerce in 1688, a major and historic victory for the merchants, whose bet in favor of Cromwell decades earlier had finally paid off spectacularly.38

The prelude to these transformative events occurred in the midst of a seemingly ceaseless series of Anglo-Dutch wars, which included not only attacking at the source of labor supply in Africa but looting numerous Negroes from Dutch slave owners on the mainland, notably the Delaware Valley, as a prelude to the assault on Manhattan.39 These conflicts also exposed the dangerous reliance of European colonizers upon Africans, even considering the wealth brought by their enslavement. The French and their Dutch allies armed the enslaved with torches to devastate the plantations of the English in the island of Saint-Christophe.40 Ultimately, the Africans of Hispaniola would emulate this trend in 1791 with disastrous consequences for enslavers.

SIX YEARS AFTER THE TAKEOVER, Jamaica was reeling with complaints about the indentured who “lay violent hands upon their masters” and would have their terms extended “two years.” There was a related problem reflected in discussions at the highest level, that is, “intelligence” doled out to the “prejudice of this island” by way of labor visiting arriving vessels.41 Do not “entertain any bought servant or slave … above one night” in a “house or plantation” was the admonition.42 “Many great mischiefs,” it was warned, arise from “wandering of servants and slaves on Sundays and Saturdays in the afternoon and other days.” European labor may have had an advantage in that there were “great complaints made of servants running away from their masters and mistresses and the same are received and concealed by others,”43 but concealing Africans was a mite more difficult. This was no minor matter since the administration was still battling “subjects of the King of Spain” and was worrying revenge would “awaken,” meaning more “fortifications,” meaning more taxes, meaning more aggrieved laborers seeking allies.44

By early 1662 it was announced that a fearsome group of Maroons had “voluntarily submitted to the English Government” and that “all the Free Negroes shall be in the same state and freedom as the English enjoy, and for every head being eighteen years old receive thirty acres of improvable land” that would include “their heirs for ever.” The trade-off was that since the regime had purportedly “changed from a military to a civil form” that their leader’s “commission as Governor of the Negroes” was to be “terminated” and instead he would be denoted as “Colonel of the Black Regiment.” The Maroons’ autonomy would include the ability to “determine all ordinary matters amongst the Negroes but all cases of great

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consequences and also of life and death shall be decided by the English.” These rambunctious Africans were ordered to “bring up their children to the English Tongue”—which would carry the added benefit of allowing the regime to monitor conversations more easily. Accept this deal, said the regime with misplaced effrontery, or be “proceeded against as outlaws and traitors.” The Maroons picked up the cast-down gauntlet and tossed it at the governor.45 A chastened regime then decided to send a delegation to confer with the “Negroes,” along with an “interpreter,” suggesting that the demand concerning the “English Tongue” had not taken hold.46 Apparently the meeting did not go well, since months later “several parties were sent out against the Rebellious Negroes.”47 That did not squash the insurgents, either, for now the “Negroes” had “begun to rob and kill,” as “this island [was] put in a posture of War.”

Throughout the 1660s the island was aflame. “Of late,” there was a murder by “Negroes,” not to mention “mutinies and insurrections or other mischiefs” too numerous to note. The remedy? “Such Negro or Negroes offending [are] to be sold or sent off this island,”48 that is, export the problem to the mainland or Antigua or Barbados. The same day in October 1663, “several Servants and Slaves” had “made their escapes and run away.” The remedy? “Every night chain and fasten their boats.”49

It was not just diehard Spaniards and local “Servants and Slaves” who were bedeviling the Jamaican elite. “Certain runaway Blacks from Barbados” had been “arriving on the north side of this island” and then “committed divers[e] insolences on the planters,” including “felonies and burglaries.” A posse should be assembled forthwith and “in case of resistance” the message was explicit: “Slay and kill the said slaves,” and if taken alive they should belong to the apprehenders “and their heirs for ever, to be sold and transported to foreign parts.”50 As the system of labor exploitation continued to evolve, slavery for life would become the destiny of too many Africans in the region—including the mainland, where many of these rebels wound up.

Memories had not faded in Jamaica of how during the 1655 invasion Africans had helped to overthrow Spanish rule. Now London’s delegates seemed to be the target. Shortly after the island was taken, Cromwell was informed that “one or two Negroes make 500 Englishmen fling down their arms and run away,” which was not reassuring to settlers. Pirates were hired to hunt down Africans, but these men were notoriously unprincipled and could easily turn on their paymasters if offered a larger paycheck. When hundreds arrived from New England as settlers, it was unclear if they were aware of the danger zone they had entered.51

The example of Maroons running free in the hills was not helpful in convincing enslaved Africans—or servants for that matter—to obey their oppressors. Months after the taking of Manhattan, which led to a new era of English and then U.S. supremacy, a harried official Jamaica was still battling “Rebellious Negroes” who tended to “beguile many Hunters and commit many murders” in ways “so contemptible and base.” The “perfidious villainies,” these “sneaking and treacherous rogues” who perpetrated same, were running wild. A reward was offered for their apprehension with potential captors being able to “have and enjoy to their uses, all the women and children and all the plunder they can find” in their “Palenque,” or stockade, “for their pleasure.52 Cruising in Jamaica’s waters were “French and Dutch

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buccaneers” who would be more than willing to accept this reward—or, for that matter, ally with the rebels and wound the regime; since there was also fretting about “English … buccaneers,”53 a premonition of the following century when mainlanders would advance their novel interpretation of patriotism in 1776 was already manifesting.

Little did London know that the revolt of the Maroons, which started with the conquest, would continue for more than half a century, conservatively speaking. As rumors spread that the rebels were receiving arms and ammunition not only from the Spaniards but from their erstwhile opponents, the Jewish community in Jamaica, the prospect materialized that London would suffer the fate that had befallen Madrid.54

RETROSPECTIVELY, THE TAKING of New Netherland was of world historic significance. It delivered a staggering blow to Dutch pretensions, as this small nation was ultimately compelled to seek an entente with its larger neighbor. It gave London control of a major site for the arrival of enslaved Africans, expanding mainland capacity and wealth. In the long term, this future metropolis of New York City became the lodestar of capital infusion that catapulted England, then the inheritor—the United States—into the vanguard of capitalism itself. More than this, New Netherland included large swathes of what became New Jersey, New York State, Delaware, and Connecticut, with outposts extending into Rhode Island.55 This opened vast opportunities for existing nearby settlements including Massachusetts, Barbados, and Jamaica, providing a safety valve whereby indentured and poorer Europeans could be deployed. It also meant the deployment of more enslaved Africans, with all the wealth they routinely delivered. It also led to a sharper demarcation of racial boundaries.

Coming slowly into view, like a film dissolve, not a snapshot, was an identity politics of “whiteness” that has persisted stubbornly into the twenty-first century.

Challenges remained for London, however, a reality that became evident a few years after losing Manhattan, when the Dutch launched a devastating attack on Virginia, as charges flew that they were simultaneously selling arms to indigenes for a similar purpose.56 Still, the Royal Navy softened the Dutch with repetitive blows of their own, for example, when in 1663 a Dutch slave ship headed from Angola to Curaçao was attacked, in an assault joined by the Portuguese.57 This conflict continued in 1664.58

Instability was the watchword in this sector of North America. Over a span of decades during the seventeenth century, no fewer than ten different colonial regimes asserted their authority in North America, just south of Manhattan.59 Loss came with a steep price. For example, there were reports that after the conquest of New Netherland in 1664, the victors sold some of the defeated into slavery in the Caribbean.60

The Dutch and the English were like two ships passing in the night. The Netherlands had advanced notoriously by welcoming dissident Protestants such as Puritans, as well as members of the Iberian Jewish community. But in 1654 a boatload of the latter group, fleeing Recife, were turned away in New Netherland by Peter Stuyvesant, who thought that acceptance would create a precedent to be employed on behalf of “Lutherans and Papists.”61 (Some apparently did arrive shortly thereafter.)62 London did not have a reputation for being as tolerant,63 but,

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ironically, began to open its doors wide in the Caribbean to those abandoning Recife, and, with even more irony, Stuyvesant himself arrived in Barbados in 1655.64 Indicative of the perceived value of the Pan-Caribbean basin, London for a while was considering taking Surinam,65 not New Netherland.

Relations between the English and Scots were still complicated. Hence, many of the latter were moving to New Amsterdam as early as 1660, which was generating complaints but may have caused those complained against to seek succor from London, bringing English and Scots together.66

The Netherlands may have been dazed by the losses it had suffered, shrinking their capacious global ambitions. Between the beginning of the seventeenth century and the Treaty of Breda in 1667, which concluded yet another Anglo-Dutch war and marked a milestone in diplomacy, only one year (1610) saw peace between the leading European states, with Holland often in the middle of the fray, bleeding profusely.67

The Netherlands’ retreat from the mountaintop was not surefooted. After they surrendered Recife, the Dutch sought to compensate by converting New Amsterdam into a major slave port. By 1660 this North American settlement had the largest population of urban slaves on the continent, which would soon prove to be a useful complement to Jamaica and Barbados.68 A catalyst for the taking of this colony by London was the contemporaneous bludgeoning of Dutch interests in the fountainhead of the all-important labor supply: West Africa. Like dominoes falling, Jamaica meant battering competitors in Africa, which provided incentive to take Manhattan.69

Weakening Dutch rule and helping to make a London capture possible was indigenous rebelliousness. Indigenes did not accept the thesis propounded by future “radicals” in North America that their ouster from their land was a step forward for humanity. Coastal indigenes, including the Narragansett people, whom London feared, found the Dutch colony of New Netherland more to their liking than, say, Massachusetts Bay. In 1653 it was feared that this ethnic group, allied with the Niantic people, were planning a joint attack with the Dutch against their mutual antagonist: London’s settlements.70 This obstreperousness was rising,71 as the Cromwell coalition was moving upward, too, providing a hint that New Netherland could soon undergo more than a name change. Just as London was vanquishing Spain in Jamaica in 1655, indigenes seemed to be on the verge of doing the same in what is now Yonkers, New York.72

Between 1649 and 1655 this recalcitrance reached a zenith. The clash was to leave not a single settler immediately west of the Hudson River. Peter Stuyvesant, the final Dutch director- general of the colony, sought to provide every farmhouse with guards to protect against arson, but this relatively tiny nation hardly had the troops to do so, particularly when the Malay Peninsula and even Surinam, which the Netherlands preferred to New Netherland, had yet to be wholly subdued. A false dawn was the settlement of what became Bergen County, New Jersey, in November 1660, but this area too came under assault by unfriendly indigenes.73

The Dutch experience—and loss—of New Netherland illustrated the overreach that was inevitable when small nations sought to gorge on large overseas territories. One of the reasons for the importation of enslaved African labor was because Dutch farm servants were difficult

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to recruit and those who came often departed for the rosier opportunities brought by the fur trade. For the funds spent on hiring one European laborer to work approximately forty days, an African—at times—could be purchased for life.74 With the arrival of Africans, the problem was that shipboard insurrections and conspiring with indigenes and other European powers happened en route, as well as arson and throats slit in the middle of the night, poisoning, and murder. Eventually, post-1776, the republicans would demonstrate that rather than relying upon a small reservoir of an ethnicity, the base of support for settler colonialism should be shifted to “race,” allowing for dipping into a vast pool of emigrants stretching from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains.

This provided a substantial population of Europeans, which by 2017 totaled about 250 million, larger than the populations of Germany, Britain, France, and a number of other Continental nations combined, dwarfing the population of Russia. The migration of settlers from diverse European nations not only denuded potential rivals of hard workers but provided influence for the North Americans in the departed homelands. This accumulation of the grateful were delighted to escape the barbarity and poverty of their homelands, not least because they were then accorded certain rights and privileges that post-1776 meant that too many were mute in the face of the further dispossession of indigenes and the further escalation of the slave trade.

With the takeover, Manhattan and its environs quickly developed one of the largest populations of enslaved Africans in North America, which created wealth and insecurity alike.75 Between the takeover and 1698, the African population of what was to become New York City doubled,76 and their oppression might have risen at a higher multiple. Despite the departure of Stuyvesant, there was a perception that the role of the Jewish community declined with the takeover. This was possible, but the articulator of this sentiment, historian Jonathan Israel, also contends that the Jewish community in London imported a significant portion of England’s sugar from the Caribbean—on the rise since the taking of Jamaica and bound to increase after 1664.77 Linda Briggs Biemer says the role of women of all categories declined too after 1664.78

Yet there is little dispute that the role of Africans increased in what had been New Netherland post-1664, along with their misery. There may be a connection between this and the catastrophic events that unwound in London during this time. For it was then that the metropolis was beset by a catastrophic plague that decimated the population, enhancing further the value of enslaved labor.79

As Africans were wrenched, London sought, at least temporarily, to tamp down tensions with European rivals. Like a conductor revving up the woodwinds as the percussion was lightened, London in the 1660s negotiated a calming “Treaty of Peace, Commerce and Alliance” with Spain,80 which would amount to a temporary respite before reloading. Still, it was a display of diplomatic deftness that helped to propel the British Isles to the forefront, insofar as it tended to checkmate Madrid’s relationship with what one Londoner called “The House of Austria.”81 Keener observers might have deduced that détente with Madrid would remain problematic as long as Protestant-Catholic strain persisted.82 Nevertheless, there had

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been a Pan-European tendency as well, which the settlement of Barbados in 1628 exemplified, and this was a precursor of the emerging identity that was “whiteness.” It acted as a solvent that tended to blur sectarian difference in pursuit of the larger goal of ransacking the Americas, then Africa, then Asia.

Thus this “Treaty of Peace” was followed quickly by a similar pact with Paris, which sought, among other things, to curb contestation in the Caribbean over Antigua, Montserrat, and St. Kitts. These contestations had allowed “slaves and servants” to manipulate one power against another, but now these purported miscreants could be “return[ed] to their masters if not sold” when caught after perpetrating sedition.83 A now battered Netherlands was forced to accept an imposed peace; again the key provision of the treaty ordered that “rebels and fugitives [were] not to be received” and nor were they to be armed or transported; instead, they should be “banished.”84

Most definitely this stilted verbiage meant labor’s strength would be curbed, as the process of enslavement went into overdrive. However, astute leaders of labor familiar with even recent history could bank on painful quarrels once again flashing between and among the European powers as they jousted for control of the rich bounty of slaves, territory, and the wealth they produced. Nonetheless, astute leaders of enslaved labor may have noticed the ongoing trend of phasing out indentured European labor, which effectively converted some past erstwhile allies into future foes. For there was a gnawing realization in London that continuing reliance on indentures could ultimately denude the domestic labor supply, and since so many of these workers were disgruntled Irish in any case, sending them to the Caribbean was akin to sending allies of His Catholic Majesty to Jamaica and Barbados.

However, new territories—Jamaica and New Netherland—required new labor. Competing to join in the enslaving feast were not only those authorized by the Company of Royal Adventurers, but also a long line of merchants, yearning and straining to join the gory bacchanal, and who in coming years were to lobby vigorously for the deregulation of this odious commerce, which became central to their indictment against the monarchy that culminated in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This unleashed a chain of events that eventuated in the revolt of 1776. The intermediate stop on this sanguinary road was the formation of the Royal African Company in 1672, a shortlived attempt by the Crown to monopolize this hateful business. But the merchants, emboldened by their triumphs in recent decades and hardly chastened by royalist restoration in 1660, came roaring back. And just as they had ousted the Crown altogether with Cromwell, they did so again in 1776 and ousted London from leadership of the even more lucrative trade in Africans in the process. The merchants had created a dynamic that a mere restoration could not resist.

The early Stuart royals had not been aggressive in the realm of overseas expansion,85 but the restored monarch in 1660 continued Cromwell’s turnabout of this lassitude, which pleased merchant powerbrokers and, perhaps, diverted them permanently from yet another beheading of a king.86

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